SIG Community#

This SIG cares about all aspects of what is helpful and harmful to this open source software community. We understand that this project is a human endeavor, and it is our job to put people before practice, process, and even progress.

Scope#

What does it mean to support a community? It means understanding and putting resources into whatever is important to people in this community. We put our own time and energy into this support, and we help coordinate and direct project resources.

What is an open source project compared to a community? A project is a general term referring to an effort by people to accomplish something that requires time and multiple steps. Pruning a rose bush is a task, where a multi-year effort to plant a new rose garden is a project. An open source software community is a type of community of practice, and the software project is the place where the community practices.

You can have a community without a project, which is really a social club. But you cannot have an open source project without a community. However, not all open source software is maintained by a project. It may rather be maintained by an individual, or a single organization through its members (employees, students, researchers, etc.) being effectively the sole contributors.

In scope#

  • Establishing a wide, diverse, and inclusive community of people and organizations from all backgrounds and situations.

  • Creating and maintaining an open source governance for the project

    • In particular establishing democratically elected overarching leadership and focus committees (Steering, Security, et al)

  • Establishing further SIGs to take over specific purviews from SIG Community

  • Being widely inclusive and holding a vision for diversity and equity in the project

  • Supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion with actions and resources

  • Maintaining project Code of Conduct and related reporting and response processes

  • Care about and improve the user and contributor experience

  • Create and maintain user personas for the project

  • Establish a project-wide documentation approach

  • Establish and maintain project-wide communication norms and channels

  • User and contributor onboarding, i.e., the process for bringing new people into the project

  • Creating and maintaining project role definitions and responsibility/authority matrix

  • Keeping track of project and community health, including the use of metrics

  • Work with SIG Operations to scope and define the infrastructure of participation for contributors

  • Ownership and financing (domain names, other project assets)

  • Ensure project-wide transparency

  • Set project technical direction and maintain a development roadmap

  • Care about the website presence and other communication outlets, e.g. social media and mail

Out of scope#

  • Directing project infrastructure

  • Handling security discussions and responses, including having no role in embargoed security situations

  • Stewarding changes to the Governance beyond the work for Governance 1.1 that establishes one or more leadership committees

  • Being the de facto body leading the Op1st project once those capabilities and responsibilities are instilled into one or more leadership committees.

Stakeholders#

  • Contributors, and by extension contributors’ organizations

  • OpenInfra Foundation, via OpenInfra Labs relationship

  • Mass Open Cloud (MOC)

  • Open Source Developers (user persona)

Subproject Creation#

Creation of subprojects happens through SIG consensus, coordinated by SIG Chairs. All subprojects and their memberships are tracked in sigs.yaml.